Description
Book SynopsisHow can we learn to notice the signs of disability?
We see indications of disability everywhere: yellow diamond-shaped deaf person in area road signs, the telltale shapes of hearing aids, or white-tipped canes sweeping across footpaths. But even though the signs are ubiquitous, Stephanie L. Kerschbaum argues that disability may still not be perceived due to a process she terms dis-attention.
To tell better stories of disability, this multidisciplinary work turns to rhetoric, communications, sociology, and phenomenology to understand the processes by which the material world becomes sensory input that then passes through perceptual apparatuses to materialize phenomenaincluding disability. By adding perception to the understanding of disability's materialization, Kerschbaum significantly expands our understanding of disability, accounting for its fluctuations and transformations in the semiotics of everyday life.
Drawing on a set of thirty-three research i
Trade Review
This engaging, accessible book builds on Stephanie Kerschbaum’s already-award-
winning scholarship on difference and discourse, constructing new research methods
and approaches, but also building community on these pages. Signs of Disability offers
an incredibly generative vocabulary for understanding the ways that disability matters:
how we mark and signal it, how we ignore and hide it, how we powerfully inhabit and
embody it through stories. Signs of Disability is a transformative book.
* Jay Dolmage, University of Waterloo *
A lovely, powerful read, Signs of Disability makes consequential, engaging, and
evocative contributions to scholarship in disability studies and in rhetorical studies. The
book’s theoretical and methodological interventions are significant and it offers cogent
readings of texts, material culture, bodies, and more. Stephanie Kerschbaum tells
powerful stories and draws readers deeply into the material life of disability and its
signs.
* Christa J. Olson, University of Wisconsin-Madison *
